André Gide (1869–1951,) fully André Paul Guillaume Gide, was a French novelist, writer, and diarist. This winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature is generally regarded as one of France’s most celebrated novelists.
Born to a middle-class Protestant family in Paris, Gide published his first novel, The Notebooks of André Walter (1891,) at age 22. In 1893 and 1894, Gide journeyed to Northern Africa, where he became very ill and narrowly escaped death. This decisive event led him to question his puritanical upbringing. It formed the basis for a pair of his renowned psychological novels, The Immoralist (1902,) about pleasure-seeking and yearning for new experiences, and Strait is the Gate (1909,) about the complexities of adolescence, love, asceticism, and sacrifice.
Gide published several semi-autobiographical narratives, essays, and memoirs. His works are characterized by the tensions in his life, viz., conflict and compromise between a sense of social moralities and individuality and the need for acceptance despite his controversial personal life and beliefs. In another famous novel, The Counterfeiters (1926,) Gide exposed the hypocrisy of insincere people. He also served as a literary critic and translated William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Joseph Conrad, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Andre Gide
Long only for what you have.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Gratitude, Appreciation, Blessings
“Know thyself” – a maxim as pernicious as it is odious. A person observing himself would arrest his own development. Any caterpillar who tried to “know himself” would never become a butterfly.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Self-Discovery, Knowledge
It is good to follow one’s own bent, so long as it leads upward.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Purpose
God depends on us. It is through us that God is achieved.
—Andre Gide
Topics: God
The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Artists, Art, Arts
One completely overcomes only what one assimilates.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Acceptance
What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it; what another would have written as well, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself—and thus make yourself indispensable.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Being True to Yourself
Are you then unable to recognize unless it has the same sound as yours?
—Andre Gide
Topics: Understanding
Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Authors & Writing
Only those things are beautiful which are inspired by madness and written by reason.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Madness, Literature, Authors & Writing
Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Compliments, Praise
Welcome everything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Acceptance, Appreciation, Gratitude, Blessings
The most decisive actions of our life — I mean those that are most likely to decide the whole course of our future — are, more often than not, unconsidered.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Intuition
The most important things to say are those which often I did not think necessary for me to say — because they were too obvious.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Conversation
The young people who come to me in the hope of hearing me utter a few memorable maxims are quite disappointed. Aphorisms are not my forte, I say nothing but banalities…. I listen to them and they go away delighted.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Listening
In order to judge properly, one must get away somewhat from what one is judging, after having loved it. This is true of countries, of persons, and of oneself.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Self-Discovery
In order to be utterly happy, the only thing necessary is to refrain from comparing this moment with other moments in the past, which I often did not fully enjoy because I was comparing them with other moments of the future.
—Andre Gide
Topics: The Present, Value of Time, Time Management, Happiness
Complete possession is proved only by giving. All you are unable to give possesses you.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Giving, Charity, Perspective
Art begins with resistance — at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.
—Andre Gide
Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Experience, Listening
Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Emotions, Self-Pity, Hedonism
Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Doubt
I owe much to my friends; but, all things considered, it strikes me that I owe even more to my enemies. The real person springs life under a sting even better than under a caress.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Adversity
True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one’s own the suffering and joys of others.
—Andre Gide
To win one’s joy through struggle is better than to yield to melancholy.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Happiness
The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Writing
Too chaste a youth leads to a dissolute old age
—Andre Gide
Topics: Youth
There is a certain state of health that does not allow us to understand everything; and perhaps illness shuts us off from certain truths; but health shuts us off just as effectively from others.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Health
Oh, would that my mind could let fall its dead ideas, as the tree does its withered leaves.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Change
The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.
—Andre Gide
Topics: Hypocrisy
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Marcel Proust French Novelist
Jean Cocteau French Poet, Artist
Anatole France French Novelist
Albert Camus Algerian-born French Philosopher
Michel Houellebecq French Author
Marquis de Sade French Political leader
Jean-Paul Sartre French Philosopher
Victor Hugo French Novelist
Simone de Beauvoir French Philosopher
Octave Mirbeau French Author